Zippy Wonderdust

Tired of wading through a crowd of bowtorns that have overstayed their welcome long after the temporal storm has passed? Zippy's Bashful Bowtorns is the mod for you.

Zippy's Thatch Patch and Zippy's Re-seeding Reeds are now available. The first alters how the raw materials for thatch are gathered and crafted, while the second adds a simple propagation mechanic for reed plants. Just like chocolate and peanut butter, these two mods go great together, but for those folks who might want one feature but not the other I have created them as two separate downloads.

Which kinda mirrors real life. The 2 main reasons we cook food is to 1) kill any parasites or bacteria in the food, and 2) pre-digest the food by using heat to break it down. In most cases you actually do get more calories from cooked food than from its raw counterpart.

Not exactly what I intended it for, but hey, whatever floats your boat. (Vampire beavers, sabre-tooth chipmunks, and eldritch mega-moose, oh my!)

Hey folks, especially @LadyWYT, rather than just sit and bitch about stuff I don't like, I made a thing. It's not much, but it's a start.

Zippy's Moose Tweaks My first mod. Just a simple thing that tweaks some moose assets. I'll let the description speak for itself. (Woo hoo! Dippin' my toes in the shallow end of the modding pool, but ya gotta start somewhere!)

Do you, by any chance, happen to live alone? (Personally I feel that brass instruments, along with bagpipes, are best appreciated outdoors. Preferably at a distance. Viewed through binoculars. )

Mods Updater . Oh. My. God. There's even pointers for getting it going on NixOS... I must have this! Thank you so much!!!

Is there?! I had no idea. Where? Somebody had a go at making a standalone mod manager a few years back, but I think it's abandoned, and besides, it's only for Windows and I'm a Linux nerd.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I can see where you're coming from. I don't agree with you, but I can respect your position. Also, how hard could it be for the devs to add an "update mod" button to the built in mod manager, right next to the enable/disable toggle? Just click the button and it goes and grabs the latest compatible version from the moddb. Even better, add a "check for updates" button too. The game already has the ability to download mods when you join a server, so the new code required should be minimal...

That's a great point. I'm aware of the mod but I choose not to use it for the same reason I avoid the other "mega-mods"; it's got some stuff I like and some stuff I don't want to touch with a stick. <SoapBoxMode> I wish certain mod authors wouldn't go all Sauron-esque, crafting the One Mod To Rule Them All. Please, just make one mod that does one thing well. If you want to do another thing, make another mod. That way, if I like Thing 1 but not Thing 2, I can simply neglect to install the mod for Thing 2. Primitive Survival has eleven different categories of things that it adds -- from trapping/fishing mechanics to food preservation, through docks and bridges, to fireworks and bombs! I only want some of that, so I have to choose between loading a huge mod and then disabling everything I don't want (if I even can) or not loading it at all. I choose not to load it. By contrast @SaltyWater does the opposite, and I really appreciate it. Each of their mods does only one thing. I can load the ones I want and leave the rest. As an added bonus the smaller code base in each mod should be easier for them to upgrade and debug. </SoapBoxMode> Whew... I feel much better now. Sorry 'bout the mess.

Regarding food requirements, yeah, now that you point it out, the meat rewards from bears and moose are pretty stingy, especially when you consider how large the animal actually is and the extra work and danger it takes to hunt them in 1.20 (since they tweaked the animal AI). A simple mod that, say, triples the meat drops for bears and moose would help to simulate that if I kill a moose, even a skinny one, I should look forward to eating like a king for a month — which is only 9 days in this game, so we must account for that too. My biggest concern should be how to preserve all the meat I just bagged at high personal risk! (Side note, I use the Bushmeat Meals mod, because I refuse to believe that anyone faced with a haunch of stringy low-fat meat wouldn’t choose to boil it into a stew!)

I wonder if the “nuisance spawns” problem could be fixed by a simple tweak to the spawning rules for predators such that spawns are disabled in any chunks with a modified block count higher than “x”, where “x” is is some reasonable number; say, something like 32 or 64? Maybe extend that to suppressing spawns in any chunks directly adjacent to a chunk with a high enough modified block count. This would simulate the process of “de-wilding” an area. ….it’s just a thought… …I wonder if I could make a mod that does this…

I gotta agree with @LadyWYT; I think they’re adorable and novel and they actually contribute to my feeling of immersion. I like the fact that Seraphs (and Traders) don’t sound like “real” people. I would find that annoying! It’s like we’re all speaking some weird Angelic language, so it fits my pre-existing “head cannon” pretty well. I will confess to avoiding the higher tones for my character. I usually go for the mid to low Sax or Flute. Hey, at least we don’t make musical snoring sounds when we sleep! (Now there’s an idea for a mod… )

If memory serves, halite contains salt, yes? Halite can form as massive intrusions or pillars, both in game and in the real world. It's totally a thing that the game is intentionally coded to do. The pillar should go all the way down to y=0. If it is wider than it is tall it is usually called a "salt dome" in real life, and you can often find deposits of oil or methane beneath them; thankfully not in-game, as I have no interest in simulating the industrial age!

But how do you get them into those traps? Does their pathing AI make them choose to jump in as a way to get to you? Or are you tricking them in somehow with something like open trap doors?

I like your ideas @Thorfinn My "tried and true" defense for temporal storms in 1.19 has been a 5x5x5 packed earth bunker surrounded by a 2 wide x 2 deep moat. The bunker has a number of stick-fence "windows" and at least one 2 block deep murder hole capped by a piece of fence so there's a half-slab size hole you can stick a spear through. Like this: TOP VIEW FRONT VIEW front XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXX X moat X FFFFF X XX*XX X XXPXX X X P X X X XX XX X X X X X X XX*XX X X X X X XXXXXXXXXXX X XXXXX X X moat X XXXXXXXXXXX back X=PACKED DIRT F=FENCE P=PLAYER *=KILLZONE It's always worked a treat against drifters. They jump in and all cluster in the kill zone trying to strike upwards at me. I can't fall down because there's a piece of fence in the way, and they can't get in because the 1-block high entrance it out of reach! It looks, however, like I need to give it a major overhaul to cope with the two new guys. I'm thinking of maybe replacing the moat with a single long straight trench leading directly away from the killzone that they need to approach along that starts only 2 deep but becomes 3 deep at the bunker so that shivers can't climb out. Also leave a half-slab size gap overlooking the trench that I can shoot arrows through to deal with any bowtorns that hang back. I too am simply musing out loud at this point. Edit to add: Will shivers jump down a 3-block high "fall" or does their pathing AI avoid falls of that height?

Saltpeter. You pretty much have to go caving to find saltpeter for making mining bombs. Other than that I completely agree with you.

I think I found the "problem". I did some testing in a randomly generated creative-mode world that has all the same mods as I usually play with. I spawned in a few Bowtorns and some moose and did some target practice with a longbow. I then came at it systematically from different distances and angles. I find that when harvesting a dead mob I now have to get super close for it to work. It is no longer enough to rely on your crosshair turning red; it can be red and you can still be too far away. I have to get as close as possible to the geometric center of the creature (close enough so that I'm actually pushing it across the ground) to get a reliable result. This means aiming for the midsection of a Bowtorn, even though I might get a red reticle over the head or lower body. Same goes for the moose; only the belly, approached from the side with the legs, gives reliable results. I didn't test any other mobs, but I suspect all of the larger ones may need this approach.

Will a pillar of packed earth work, or does it have to be some kind of rock?

VS is not open source, so outsiders can't even start packaging a new version until they release it to the public. It's not so much an ability problem as it is a timing one.

Not just for noobs! I've worked as a programmer/sysadmin for 37 years (eep!), mostly on the Unix side of things, and started using Linux back in the days of Yggdrasil Linux (1993). I can be a total grognard at times yet I prefer to install flatpaks over whatever my current distro offers because it makes my life easier. They're a 1-click install on most major distros, they tend to be the latest version direct from the author, and they run in a (mostly) sandboxed environment, so I don't have to manually wrestle with dependency hell (mono/dotnet anyone?). Also, the risk of them escaping the sandbox and doing anything bad to the rest of my system is very low... ...which is my big complaint about AppImages; they're a wide open avenue for malware. (Also, Flathub has apparently been baked into SteamOS by default for a while now.)

The 1.20.3 update of Vintage Story became available to me today (27-Jan-2025) on Flathub, which is about par for the course. I've noticed that it usually takes about 48 to 72 hours for whoever is maintaining it to push out an update. It's a delay that is just long enough to be frustrating but not really long enough to be worth complaining about! Edit to add: Flatpak has really become *the* way to distribute software on Linux these days, as it is distro-agnostic. I too wish the VS devs would either a) take the task in-house or maybe b) arrange to coordinate with whoever the current maintainer is to release an advance copy to them, say, 48 hours before the standalone version becomes available for download, so that both distribution methods can be in sync. I'm also well aware that it would be difficult to justify the extra effort for a demographic (Linux users) that likely doesn't even constitute 10% of their customer base.

I’m tempted to think so. I’ve also noticed that, in 1.19, you can’t make a greenhouse roof from diagonally adjacent glass half slabs; the game refuses to consider it an enclosed space. Also in 1.19, diagonally adjacent thatch still lets snow particles through in the winter. I have to put a second layer of straw bales beneath to prevent that. I may need to pay more attention to the design of the corners of my temporal storm panic-room/murder-fortress to avoid becoming potential target practice for bowtorns!

*This* concerns me greatly, if it can be confirmed. I'll be none too pleased if the game's projectile physics allows mob projectiles to glitch through solid blocks! Hey @Kevin Eric Snell have you (or anyone else) experienced this more than once? Is it possible for arrows in VS to glitch through the corners of blocks like they do in that other block game (where you can hide a pressure plate behind two diagonally adjacent blocks and then activate it by shooting it *through* the corners)?